Chapter 1.  Setting Up the Environment

The two fundamental questions that one can ask when a new development tool is announced or launched are: how different is the new tool from other competitor tools and how enhanced is it when compared to its own previous versions? If we are going to invest our time in learning a new framework, common sense says we need to ensure that we get a good return on our investment. There are so many good articles out there about the pros and cons of each framework. To me, choosing Angular boils down to the following three aspects:

• The foundation: Angular is introduced and supported by Google and targeted at evergreen modern browsers. This means that we, as developers, don't need to look out for hacky solutions in each browser upgrade anymore. The browser will always be updated to the latest version available, letting Angular worry about the new changes and leaving us out of it. This way, we can focus more on our development tasks.
• The community: Think about the community as an asset; the bigger the community, the wider the range of solutions to a particular problem. Looking at the statistics, the Angular community is still way ahead of others, and the good news is that this community is leaning toward being more involved and contributing more on all levels.
• The solution: If you look at the previous JS frameworks, you will see most of them focus on solving a problem for a browser first, and then for mobile devices. The argument for that could be simple--JS wasn't meant to be a language for mobile development. However, things have changed to a great extent over recent years and people now use mobile devices more than before. I personally believe that a complex native mobile application, which is implemented in Java or C, is more performant compared to its equivalent implemented in JS, but the thing here is that not every mobile application needs to be complex. So, business owners have started asking questions like "Why do I need a machine gun to kill a fly?"

With that question in mind, Angular chose a different approach. It solves the performance challenges faced by mobile devices first. In other words, if your Angular application is fast enough on mobile environments, then it is lightning fast in the evergreen browsers.

So, that is what we will do in this chapter: 

• First, we will learn about Angular and the main problem it solves
• Then, we will talk a little bit about JavaScript history and the differences between Angular and AngularJS 1
• Next we will introduce The Sherlock Project
• Finally, we will install the tools and libraries we need to implement this project.